I told you I would blog from Virginia Tech, and it turns out I am a faithless blogger. I have no reasonable excuse, and expect no forgiveness. I could list for you the reasons this happened (early morning flight to Roanoke, bus to Blacksburg, cover one of the most emotional events of my career, bus back to Roanoke while writing next day's column ON THE BUS, fly back to Tampa...), but you don't care. I mean, SteveB might care, but most of you don't.

You want to know what it was like there in Blacksburg. You want to know about Marcy Crevonis, the girl who asked Jeter to take a picture with her fiance's memorial stone, and who later, while watching the game, told me she didn't want it to end because the next month, leading up to the anniversary of the shooting, is going to be so brutal.

You want to know about the girl who found Joe Girardi while he was sitting in the stands talking to Va-Tech football coach Frank Beamer and told him that her brother was killed in the shooting and her mother wanted her to thank Girardi for bringing his team into town for the game.

You want to know about Theresa Walsh, who heard the shots on April 16 and ran out into a hallway, where the gunman saw her, turned his gun on her and fired -- but missed. Theresa was at the game, and she said this: "People just want it to go back to the way it was, but it never will. I don't think it'll ever be normal. There's just going to be a new state of normalcy."

You want to know about how Alex Rodriguez called it "the proudest day I've ever had in a Yankee uniform" and then backed it up by sitting in the Virginia Tech dugout for a couple of innings, answering the players' questions about hitting and his career and handing out souvenirs -- game-used bats, batting gloves and wristbands that they'll cherish for the rest of their lives.

You want to know about Pete Hughes, the Va-Tech baseball coach who wryly told us, "Just the cure for an eight-game losing streak, huh? The Yankees."

I did the best I could in a column that will appear this morning on nj.com, and feel free to check it out. But I have to tell you -- this was a hard day to describe thoroughly. We were on campus for less than seven hours, and we were overwhelmed with the number of heartbreaking stories we heard. We were mere visitors -- interlopers, even -- to a place that has been living with this for 11 months and always will.

The people in Blacksburg treated us beautifully. That old cliche about Southern hospitality, I gotta tell you -- it's no lie. And everywhere we went, all anybody said -- to the players, to Brian Cashman, to Joe Girardi, Hal Steinbrenner, Michael Kay and even us lowly writers -- was "Thank you all for coming." And they meant it.

It was cold in the outdoor press box, sure -- mid-40s for a couple of hours had us all shivering as we typed quickly so we wouldn't miss those buses back to the airport. But as incredible as this is, in the whole group of sportswriters, there wasn't one complaint all day. I guess the whole lesson of this trip was "Look -- it could be worse."

During the sixth inning, as we all shivered together, grouchy old George King from the Post came back from the concession stand with eight cups of hot chocolate and handed them out to the rest of us.

That's the kind of day it was. A day to think about everybody else but yourself.

That's what's going on on that campus -- a place where people are, daily, showcasing a strength and resilience that I can't fathom in light of their circumstances.

I'm proud, honored and humbled to have been a witness to it. It's a day I'll never forget as long as I live.